April 2, 2018

Guns don't protect speech, and govt is not the main censor: Antitrust needed to break up media / tech monopolies who control public forums

As the gun nuts become more desperate to defend their policy of allowing private citizens to amass personal arsenals of military-style weapons, they have shifted from making one sort of slippery slope argument to another.

First, they began by appealing to other gun nuts and conservatives, arguing that if you let the government prohibit you from owning an extreme type of gun, they will not be satisfied and will move on to prohibiting ordinary types of guns. Realizing that there aren't that many gun nuts or conservatives in the population, compared to moderates and liberals, they gave up on that line of defense.

Now they have begun trying to appeal to normies by arguing that the political goals of moderates -- not just conservatives -- are served by a hardline stance on gun deregulation.

The NRA's recent propaganda tries to show non-whites and women as the winners from gun deregulation -- letting them practice self-defense in dangerous ghettos or against violent would-be rapist males. If you want to regulate guns, the propaganda says, you're only going to make disarmed minorities and women more vulnerable -- and therefore, gun-grabbing liberals are the real racists and sexists.

No one believes any argument about liberals and Democrats being the real racists and sexists, but that doesn't stop the Right from trotting out these failed appeals over and over again. The even more retarded among them agree that it's a pointless argument -- but only because appealing to normies at all is pointless, and that they should only focus on ginning up hysteria to turn out the gun nut "base" (a tiny minority in a country where 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns).

In the same vein as "Dems are the real racists," gun nuts have begun arguing that extreme deregulation of gun laws serves another treasured goal of moderates -- protecting free speech. As a commenter here recently said, "When you give up your second amendment they will take your first amendment."

I'm not clear on whether they focus on freedom of thought and speech, or extend it to freedom of assembly also -- as though we could not freely assemble in public without the possibility of showing up armed, to deter would-be breaker-uppers of our crowd.

At any rate, "No 1A without the 2A" is the most paranoid branding mistake that gun nuts could make when trying to appeal to normies. The desired regulations are not to repeal the 2nd Amendment anyway, but to de-militarize the weaponry that private citizens own.

The NRA was not a gun nut lobby until the late 1970s -- meaning, the focus on more military style weapons, vigilante fantasies, and paranoid rhetoric about the federal gubmint coming to take your guns.

Americans did enjoy free speech before the late '70s, and if anything the situation has deteriorated during the Reagan era since. That's not because the Reaganites championed censorship per se, but because of their over-arching goal of deregulation and laissez-faire toward corporations.

That directly led to the consolidation of the media into five gigantic monopolies, and later to info-tech firms that would centralize all online media into a few monopolies. From that concentration of wealth and power came the ability to censor speech -- and with the ability, the implementation.

And unlike the agricultural, energy, and military-industrial sectors of the economy who control the Reaganite GOP, the senior management of the media and info-tech sectors are overwhelmingly liberal. So when they flex their organizational muscles, it will be to strangle conservatives.

Impotent right-wingers only wagged their limp fingers at the media and tech monopolies whose towering wealth and power they had encouraged and indeed worshiped. Why would organizations with the ability to censor, not actually use it? For the greater good? -- bullshit, they're imperial corporations controlled by power-hungry billionaires.

And for the longest time, conservatives refused to even identify corporations as the main threat to free speech -- their #1 enemy was always the gubmint, from whose tyranny the corporations would save us. Corporations would never regulate our lives, right?

The growth of the internet was supposed to provide a forum inherently immune from attacks by government tyranny -- it was a virtual rather than physical space, and distributed rather than centralized in organization. And yet, it has given us mega-corporations that are the sole space for most speech these days, which is subject to arbitrary censorship by the managers of these corporations.

The only way to break their hold on free speech is to break up their concentrated wealth and power, through antitrust actions. But the dumb dinosaur Reaganites are still adhering to the faith about laissez-faire regardless of the costs to society and to individuals -- even when the regulations would crush liberal censors like Facebook and Twitter.

It's time for the Right to get with the Trumpian times, and start demanding trust-busting of media and tech monopolies in order to protect free speech -- not promote some laughable vigilante fantasy about protecting your free speech with guns.

Your entire private arsenal will have zero effect on Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube banning conservative people or ideas. You're not going to take your private arsenal to a college campus and do literal battle with the Leftist professors. And you're not going to launch a literal attack by surrounding the CNN headquarters with your militia buddies.

You have to fight power with power -- and security-blanket arsenals give no power to the cosplay warriors who own them. They must instead take over the government to dismantle the over-sized corporations that have such a monopoly on the forums of speech.

Somebody's going to be doing the regulating. Regulate them before they regulate you.

3 comments:

Outside of the gun issue you have generally a lot of good points and corporate control is something the .Alt Right and Rebel Right are gradually and begrudgingly coming to accept as necessary

They'll have to purge the rest of the money cucks and Libertarians from their organizations but this too is happening in real time not Internet time

This is especially true among the people who you'd qualify as gun nuts and the Populist Authoritarian Right

Ironically the censorious ways of the elite have done more to signal boost the Right than anything the Right could have done and the adaptation of Alinskite tactics has changed the ideological battlefield in profound ways

That said there are basically no such things as military grade weapons in civilian hands. A tiny number of regulated automatic weapons and destructive devices exist, these requiring an FBI background check to own but otherwise the scary rifles are semi automatic hunting rifles with ugly stocks

The only difference between an AR15 or variant and say a Remington rifle available a hundred years ago is magazine size and appearance

Regulating magazines by size like Canada and California does is stupid as it takes about 2 seconds to change one. I suppose one could ban detachable magazines entirely but it might well be illegal

That said its too the point the urban Left and the rest of the country should not share a polity period. How we get to separation lawfully and without violence is a real challenge though

A last point, I'll note the Left actually has launched military style attacks on the Right in Las Vegas (yes that was political) and in Republican members of the House such tactics are highly a bad idea right now for anybody and of course illegal

They also haven't been terribly useful and the Right isn't well organized as of yet but such things do happen and with effort can be made to happen quite often

A couple of guys with AK"s was able to shut down power to part of Silicon Valley just a few years back and they weren't trying.

Once that becomes commonplace and if the scale is enough (there are millions of militia here) though the US will separate as many nations with irreconcilable differences should

"Outside of the gun issue you have generally a lot of good points and corporate control is something the .Alt Right and Rebel Right are gradually and begrudgingly coming to accept as necessary"

The old Left hated corporations, and the Old Right adored corps. The corporate world has become so overwhelmingly PC since the late 80's that young people on the Right hate a lot of corporate culture, while the young Left is ambivalent about corporate culture, touting some companies while bashing others. Among conservative early Gen X-ers (and of course Boomers). the old mythology about "government pressure" dictating corporate culture is still trotted out, but younger people mostly don't buy it.

Older people are more comfortable with mega rich people and corporate monopolies, and tend to think that they "earned" what they have and should enjoy it, while everyone else stays out of their way. Younger people are more comfortable with the old school Left approach of busting up wealth conglomeration and also appropriating once private goods for public use. Of course, the Right also did quite a bit of this too in the the early-mid 20th century; what we're talking about is individualism vs collectivism. The modern cuck Right naturally has tried to claim that Hitler and Mussolini were "Leftists" because they made government too big.

"And for the longest time, conservatives refused to even identify corporations as the main threat to free speech -- their #1 enemy was always the gubmint, from whose tyranny the corporations would save us. Corporations would never regulate our lives, right?"

The (naive) belief among Western conservatives from the 1970's-2000's was that private sector ubermensch (as defined by higher economic status) accumulating as much wealth and power as possible was an antidote to underclass crusaders smashing and possibly grabbing that which they never were morally entitled to. How could we incentivize hard work and progress if we didn't endlessly suck up to angelic elites, while promoting Horatio Alger type stuff?

Granted, hardly anyone actually really believed this stuff....Until the economic booms of the mid-80's and subsequent decades. Then it really did seem like there was no problem at all with everyone being a turbo capitalist, trying to go big and get rich, heedless to any long-terms problems associated with inequality.